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Published: February 11, 2007

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Larry Morris/The New York Times

Podcast: Scheduled to appear this week are Stephen Metcalf on James Fenton; Jay Jennings on Pete Maravich (above); Ben Schoen on Harry Potter; and Dwight Garner, senior editor, with best-seller news. Sam Tanenhaus, the editor of the Book Review, is the host.

Video: An interview with Jim Harrison, the author of ''Returning to Earth.''

First Chapters: Excerpts from ''Returning to Earth,'' by Jim Harrison; ''Alabama Moon,'' by Watt Key; and other books.

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This week's cover review is by Will Blythe, who writes for us regularly -- or at least as often as we can persuade him to. Blythe is the former literary editor of Esquire magazine and the author of a book called ''To Hate Like This Is to Be Happy Forever: A Thoroughly Obsessive, Intermittently Uplifting, and Occasionally Unbiased Account of the Duke-North Carolina Basketball Rivalry.''

Blythe first encountered Jim Harrison's work, he says, during his freshman year in college. ''Like every Harrison book since, it made me hungry. Some astute publisher ought to issue 'The Gout-Lover's Cookbook,' by Jim Harrison, for all of us fans of fat and alcohol. Every recipe would be for triple portions.''

When Blythe's own book came out, he told us, he ''wondered if I'd pay for every smart-aleck remark I'd ever made at an author's expense.'' But he added: ''I love passionate reviews, passionate hatred or love being better for literature's well-being than bland and compulsory generosity. I love reviews that are performances in themselves -- they're better tributes to the books under scrutiny than earnest summaries. I like it when a book seems to trigger a reviewer's imagination, wilder flights of fancy.''The Editors